Saturday, October 17, 2009

#s

I hate it when people try to make the case that there IS parity and/or equality in Major League Baseball. Occasionally you'll hear a Yankee fan trying to justify their team's exorb. payroll by saying "look at the Tampa Rays last year! Look at the Twins! Anyone can win!" So full of shit.

I just took a look at the top 12 teams, payroll-wise (for 2009), and compared them to the bottom 12, to see how much success they've had in the last ten seasons, including 2009.

Top 12: 48 playoff teams out of a possible 80. 23 LCS appearances out of a possible 40.11 World Series appearances out of a possible 20. (so far)6 World champions out of a possible 10. (so far)

Bottom 12: 17 playoff teams out of a possible 80. 6 LCS appearances out of a possible 40.3 World Series appearances out of a possible 20.2 World champions out of a possible 10.

So the current top 12 have succeeded at a rate of 3 to 4 times that of the current bottom 12, over the last decade. Time for equality, MLB. And, of course, robot umpires.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Puking From The Shoes

The Angels looked about as scared as Ronan Tynan in a synagogue. (And by that I don't mean they had giant ears and no legs.)

Those goddamn chicken-shit motherhumper Angels better show up for the rest of this series like they did for the last one. Come on, aren't you supposed to be doing it for the dead guy? Don't let his family down!

In case you missed the game, it was sort of a "Greatest Hits" of the past few decades of Yankee cheapness. The broken bat bloops, the bad calls, the opponent errors, the Jeter hits to right field, and the classic "ball that's an out 9,999 times out of 10,000 but not only does the Yankee opponent fuck it up, but the Yankees somehow get credit for a hit on the play." In other words, absolutely sickening. (And with bonus of Joe Buck telling us how the Yankees "expect to win" now, as if that counts for JOHN FECES!)

And I still don't get why Yankee fans continue to come to games dressed as blue chairs. It's just bizarre.

The Sight Of Guesses And Balloons

Okay, the guesses are posted in the comments of that last post. Good luck. A bunch of you are kinda boxed in there in the high 40s...

Side balloon-boy note: I'm noticing a movement that's gaining ground by the minute. It's people saying, "God, you people are so stupid--anyone with half a brain knows a boy couldn't have been in a balloon that small..." followed by a bunch of scientific facts they cut and pasted from somewhere else.

I'd just like to point out that, as someone who watched it live, we had no idea how big the thing was! Granted, I figured the kid was off hiding--but not because I didn't think it was possible for a kid to have been in there. All we saw was this saucer floating in the sky. It could have been 100 feet in diameter, it could have been six. With nothing to compare it to for scale, how could we know?? Hooper was a pretty good scientist, and even he needed Brodie to walk out farther on the boat to figure out how big Jaws was. And now I'm considered to be some kind of moron by a bunch of people who weren't even watching. Terrible job, Pretend-To-Know-Balloon-Size junta!

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Lil' Contest

Here's what we'll do. Guess how many total runs will be scored in the NLCS, by both teams combined. You have until the first pitch of game TWO is thrown. (Why? Because game one's about to start and I didn't think of this until now.) Put your guess in the comments--I won't reveal any of the guesses until game two starts. I will make the winner one of my patented (not really) customizable baseball card magnets. Winner is closest person to the amount. If more than one person wins, great, you both get a magnet.

By the way, I knew that kid wasn't in that flying thing. (I predicted he was in the bathroom....)

[Update, 10/16, 11:35 AM: We've got 9 people so far. Two of them guessed the same amount within one minute of each other. You've got till 4:07 to get your guess in...]

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

A Thing To Watch Or Whatever While My Baseball Thoughts Remain In My Head

I had this embedded, but I had to remove it. You know why? Because the stupid fucking Google ads that are now in lots of GooTube videos pertain to the site the vid is embedded on. So, since my blog has "pinstripe" in the title and mentions the Yankees a lot, that video on my site gives you an ad to buy Yankee merchandise.

Yet another reason why marketing/advertising is so lame.

(If you've been following this blog since the beginning, you know I had a similar problem right when I started it. Everything comes back around again...)

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Joe Catfish

Guess I'm still not in the mood to talk about Red Sox stuff. But I had been meaning to say this about Torii Hunter: Did you see that interview where he talked about how none of the Angels ever think about how they'd never beaten the Red Sox in the playoffs? And at the end he looks right at the camera and says the only time it comes up is when the media brings it up? Terrible job by him there. Don't act like you don't think about it. It's not like after the ALCS in '04 someone had to point it out to me that the Red Sox had previously had trouble with the Yankees on occasion. Anyway, by celebrating a Game One home run to the point where he had to fire his helmet into the ground, he proved that he indeed had thought about it. Not really relevant now, but I just thought that was a bad move by him, to act like this was something that was forced on him, when he clearly was--rightfully, perhaps--using it as motivation.

I guess this video I shot during the final game will be a companion piece to this post. This was right after Attention Boy didn't get his way and decided to slam his bat into the plate--a move that Bob Watson would have come up with some kind of suspension for had it been a Boston player:

Monday, October 12, 2009

A Song About A Superhero

Our Northampton trip today was a good remedy for the first-day-of-winter blues. Tomorrow I'll post pictures from something or other, maybe even the last Fenway game if I feel like it.

Hey, remember I interviewed the oldest living MLB player, Tony Malinosky? Well, he finally turned 100 years old. Nice job, Tony! This article mentions that he actually was in attendance at the Dodgers game that day. And a few newspaper reporters have written to me recently about the pieces they're writing about Tony. I'll have to link to those if and when they go up online.